English 106

Introduction to Composition

As a member of the "You Are Here" syllabus approach at Purude, my courses have approached composition as a highly contextualized activity. All of my courses involve multimodal writing as well as dynamic, online exchange, most often conducted through course blogs, forums, listservs, and wikis. Since my courses tend to be topical in nature, I breifly discuss my past three syllabi individually.

Composition 2.0: Rhetoric Goes Digital

Course Description

I designed this course with three other graduate instructors at Purdue University: Mark Leahy, Ryan P. Weber, and Michael Covarrubias. The course has two primary tracks: first, our 80 students were grouped topically according to their own interests into 18 blogs ranging from political commentary to alternative sports to culinary interests to firearm enthusiasts. Students created anonymous online identities and are required to post 1,000 words a week on their subject. The second strain of the course concerns contemporary perspectives on blogging--students have read a range of readings (some enthusiastic, some critical) on how digital communicative technologies are impacting Western culture. The semester culminates in a reflective project that calls upon students to locate themselves within discussions of technology based on their experience blogging. The ,complete 106 course description, intended for students, is available on my course website.

Course Syllabus

The course syllabus is available online

Course Texts

Coursepack. Table of contents (chronologically ordered):

Additional Course Websites

Because we are committed to maintaing student anonymity, I cannot link to specific student blogs.

Presenting University

Course Description

This course grew out of Thomas Rickert's graduate seminar on Institutional Rhetorics. I co-created this course with three other graduate instructors: Nathaniel Rivers, Ryan P. Weber, and Paul Lynch. All four of us thought that students would be particularly invested in a course that examined the fundamental metaphors historically grounding education. Students spend five weeks reading some of the core perspectives in the history of education (Plato's discussion of the Cave, Cicero's discussion of education as social health, Kant's "What is Enlightenment," Jefferson's discussion of land-grant education, early 20th century discussions of "bootstraps"). Then, students use these perspectives to analyze contemporary discussions on academic freedom, the corporatization of education, and the culture wars.

We also were interested (along with another instructor, Jeremy Tirrell), in incorporating contemporary digital technology into the class structure. Each week, students engaged challenging materials and posted reactions, interpretations, and questions to a class blog. For a five-week period, our classes came together to discuss these issues on one large, 80 member electronic forum. We found that while not every student engaged this digital format, many students posted more often and posted more substantive material when they knew it would be read and responded to by a large audience.

We presented a detailed discussion of our approach at the 2007 Computers and Writing conference; the presentation has been adapted into a web-text and is currently under review at Kairos (sorry no link).

Course Syllabus

The course syllabus is available online

Course Texts

Coursepack. Table of contents (chronologically ordered):

Additional Course Websites

Unfortunately, due to a server crash, the Drupal forums we used for this site are temporarily unavailable. This course also participates in my Visual CoOperative project which I describe further on my courses and materials page.